The elderly robot helps people sit and stand up, and catch them if they fall

The American population is older than it has ever been. Today, the country’s median age is 38.9, which is almost a decade more than in 1980. And the number of adults over 65 years old should go from 58 million to 82 million by 2050. The challenge of taking care of the elderly, in the midst of care shortages, an increase in health care costs and evolving family structures, is a growing societal problem.

To help raise the Eldercare challenge, a team of MIT engineers turns to robotics. They built and tested the elderly body assistance robot, or an electronic bar, a mobile robot designed to physically support the elderly and prevent them from falling as they move in their homes.

E-Bar acts as a robotic handlebar set that follows a person from behind. A user can walk independently or rely on the robot’s arms to get support. The robot can support the total weight of the person, passing him from the session to the standing position and vice versa along a natural trajectory. And the robot’s arms can support them by quickly inflating side airbags if they start to fall.

With their conception, researchers hope to prevent falls, which are today the main cause of injury in adults 65 and over.

“Many elderly people underestimate the risk of falling and refuse to use physical aid, which are heavy, while other overestively risk and may not exercise, leading to the drop in mobility,” said Harry Asada, Ford engineering teacher at MIT. “Our concept of design is to provide the elderly with a balance of balance with a robotic handlebars to stabilize their bodies. The handlebars goes anywhere and provides support at any time, whenever they are necessary.”

In its current version, the robot works via a remote control. In future iterations, the team plans to automate a large part of the boots’ features, which allows them to physically follow and help a user independently. Researchers also work on the rationalization of the device to make it thinner and more handy in small spaces.

“I think Eldercare is the next big challenge,” said the designer of the electronic bar Roberto Bolli, a student graduate from the MIT mechanical engineering department. “All demographic tendencies underline a shortage of caregivers, a surplus of the elderly and a strong desire for the elderly to age. We see it as an unexplored border in America, but also as an intrinsically interesting challenge for robotics.”

Bolli and Asada will present an article detailing the design of the electronic bar at the IEEE conference on robotics and automation (ICRA 2025) held in Atlanta from May 19 to 23.

The MIT Asada group develops a variety of technologies and robotic aids to help the elderly. In recent years, others have developed autumn prediction algorithms, designed for robots and automated devices, including robotic walkers, self-infrannant airbags and robotic frames that guarantee a person with a harness and move with them when they walk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlt6VHX4DZ4

In the design of E-Bar, Asada and Bolli was aimed at a robot which mainly performs three tasks: providing physical support, preventing falls and moving safely and discreetly with a person. In addition, they sought to delete any harness, to give a user more independence and mobility.

“The elderly do not like with massively not carrying harnesses or assistance devices,” explains Bolli. “The idea behind the structure of the electronic bar is that it provides body weight support, active assistance with the process and a fall capture while being completely cleared at the front. You can simply go out at any time.”

The team sought to design a robot specifically for the aging in place at home or to help in healthcare establishments. On the basis of their interviews with the elderly and their caregivers, they proposed several design requirements, in particular that the robot must go through the doors of the house, allow the user to take fully the stride and support all his weight to help balance, posture and transitions from the session to standing.

The robot consists of a 220 -pound high base whose dimensions and structure have been optimized to support the weight of an average human without tilting or sliding. Under the base is a set of omnidirectional wheels which allows the robot to move in any direction without pivot, if necessary. (Imagine that the wheels of a car move to slip into a space between two other cars, without parallel parking.)

The extent of the robot base is an articulated body made from 18 bars or interconnected links, which can reconfigure like a foldable crane to lift a person from a session to a standing position, and vice versa. Two arms with a handlebar extend from the robot in the shape of a U, where a person can stand between the two and rely against them if they need additional support.

Finally, each arm of the robot is integrated into airbags made from a soft but adherent material which can swell instantly to catch a person if they fall, without causing bruises on the impact. Researchers think that E-Bar is the first robot capable of catching a person who falls without portable devices or using a harness.

They tested the robot in the laboratory with an older adult who volunteered to use the robot in various household scenarios. The team noted that E -Bar could actively support the person when he leaned to pick up something from the ground and extended to reach an object on a shelf – tasks that can be difficult to do while maintaining the balance. The robot was also able to lift the person up and on the lip of a bathtub, simulating the task of leaving a bathtub.

Bolli plans that an e-bar design would be ideal for use at home by the elderly who still have a moderate degree of muscle force but require assistance devices for the activities of daily life.

“Seeing the technology used in real scenarios is really exciting,” says Bolli.

In their current article, researchers have not incorporated any capacity for predicting falls in the e-bar airbag system. But another project of the ASADA laboratory, led by the student graduate Emily Kamienski, focused on the development of algorithms with automatic learning to control a new robot in response to the level of fall in real time of the user.

In addition to E-Bar, Asada sees different technologies in its laboratory, such as providing different levels of assistance to people in certain phases of life or mobility.

“The conditions for the care of the elderly can change every week or month,” said Asada. “We would like to provide continuous and transparent support as a person’s handicap or mobility changes with age.”

This story is republished with the kind authorization of Mit News (Web.mit.edu/newsoffice/), a popular site that covers news of research, innovation and MIT teaching.